Home > Work > Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food
1 " Most herbal knowledge was kept alive as folk medicine, handed down from mother to daughter, a kind of inheritance..But a woman in control of her own body was a dangerous thing, .. The wise women who continued to practice their art were considered witches. Between 1450 and 1750 in Europe and North America, an estimated thirty-five thousand to one hundred thousand people, most of them women, were accused of wildcrafting and put to death. "
― , Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food
2 " Prior to European contact, the Americas were home to nearly 100 million Indigenous people, who between them spoke some one thousand to two thousand languages. The number of different plants they relied upon was enormous. Across North America, it is estimated that pre-contact people used over twenty-six hundred different species, nearly half exclusively for medicine. Less than one hundred of these plants were cultivated. The rest grew wild. "
3 " Enslaved Africans had some of the most detailed knowledge of the natural environments of the Americas, as they often looked to wild foods to supplement their insufficient rations or foraged for medicinal and shamanistic herbs. Poisoning was one of the only ways enslaved people might overpower their masters, and knowing the properties of wild plants could mean the difference between freedom and bondage. "
